Food and wine labs provide taste of real-world hospitality industry
- Drew Sterwald
- School of Resort & Hospitality Management
- Contributors: Tim Clark, Photos & Video
5 – minute read
Stepping into Sugden Hall’s food demonstration laboratory, Florida Gulf Coast University students realize they’re not in mom and dad’s kitchen anymore.
The working classroom’s Vulcan gas range stretches two to three times the width of a standard household stove. Beside it sits a salamander, a high-powered infrared ceramic broiler that can quickly caramelize a delicate crème brulee crust or char a hefty T-bone steak. In another part of the kitchen stands a tabletop dry-aging refrigerator that uses smart technology to enhance the flavor of beef and cure charcuterie meats in a compact, energy-efficient environment.
This shining showcase of stainless-steel tables and commercial-grade appliances offers many resort and hospitality administration majors their first taste of restaurant operations behind the scenes. The state-of-the-art kitchen is one of the signature facilities of FGCU’s distinctive hospitality program, along with the adjoining wine-tasting lab. In that room, students taking the wine tasting and merchandising course sit at desks outfitted with special lighting for assessing color and clarity, and with personal sinks for spitting — like the pros, they are taught to slurp not swill every sample pour.
Hands-on experience planning menus, costing provisions and preparing dishes — along with tasting and merchandising wines to pair with food — gives FGCU graduates an appetizing competitive advantage and a broader array of internship and career opportunities in an ever-expanding Southwest Florida tourism, hospitality and entertainment industry.
“I’m about to do my internship,” says Yannick Petit, a senior resort and hospitality administration major in an introductory food and beverage management class.
“I hope to bring the knowledge I got here into that. I’ve never really worked in a kitchen before, so that was a good kind of segue into learning how the kitchen works and the communication that you need to have in relation to the front of house and everything. It was an eye-opening experience.”
And a hands-on one. Petit learned new skills such as how to operate a restaurant-level grill and oven and how to cook meat to different standard temperatures. He’s more comfortable with hospitality outside of the kitchen, he says, but gaining insight from this culinary class is essential to a deeper understanding of the business he plans to go into. Someday, he hopes to open his own restaurant.
The course Petit completed in the fall term covers management concepts and practices in food and beverage — not how to audition for “Top Chef.” Students in this course practice basic cooking techniques with professionally trained chef James Fraser in addition to learning organizational essentials such as safe handling of food and kitchen tools, standard yields and portion costs for food and beverage products, analyzing trends to estimate food production requirements and menu development and product selection.
Olivia Knapinski ate it all up. A junior who plans to go into event management, she entered the hospitality world in high school by working at a wedding venue.
“I got to see people having the best day of their life all the time, and I was just like, ‘I want to do this all the time,’” she says. “The whole reason I came to FGCU is for this program. I moved here from Ohio wanting to make sure I was getting the best experience possible. Part of that was seeing the hospitality classes offered and seeing how immersive they are and how you get real-world experience.”
Her dream is a career in sports event management, but Knapinski realized she needed some kitchen experience because food service is typically part of planning any event.
“It’s important to know how your food and beverage team is running, and if they need help how you can help. But also, if you have to step into that role, you’re prepared to know those things. This class definitely helped raise my awareness about problems that you can have and how you can effectively fix them. I wasn’t very familiar with food and beverage. So coming in, I wanted to learn more about strategy and pricing and things like that but also the creative side.”
The latter is another facet of hospitality she hopes to explore in Fraser’s “Culture, Food & Spirits” course, which also uses the food demonstration lab. Students make beer and wine and cured meats and cheeses, while also learning about regional artisanal food culture, gastronomic entrepreneurship, branding and marketing, fair trade, food deserts and food-centered tourism.
“The class is about discovery,” says Fraser, who earned a culinary bachelor’s degree and MBA at Johnson & Wales University and has certifications in cuisine, pastry and wine from Le Cordon Bleu, Paris.
“It’s very cross-disciplinary. It’s hospitality, it’s entrepreneurship, agribusiness, science, marketing, sustainability and ethics. When we’re doing food and beverage production, it’s not so much developing recipes as understanding the techniques and skill sets that are a lifetime commitment for artisan producers. They learn how to put a value on that expertise and cost and how to market it.”
Tourism related to agriculture, cooking and wine has long been popular across Europe, where regional culinary traditions often go back centuries. Think of truffle hunting, olive oil-making and Chianti and Brunello tasting tours of Tuscany, for instance.
“Countries and cultures like Spain, Italy and France depend on agritourism,” Fraser says. “The initiative to drive up tourism-based agricultural experiences in the U.S. is one of the up-and-coming things. This class is a beginning platform to learn how that can work.”
–This story is part of a series about FGCU’s unique learning and research spaces.